Climate Change Is Inevitable. Get Used to It

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Climate Change Is Inevitable. Get Used to It

* Photo: Alan R. Moller/Getty * The awful truth is that some amount of climate change is a foregone conclusion. The Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, calculates that even if the US, Europe, and Japan turned off every power plant and mothballed every car today, atmospheric CO2 would still climb from the current 380 parts per million to a perilous 450 ppm by 2070, thanks to contributions from China and India. (Do nothing and we'll get there by 2040.) In short, we're already at least lightly browned toast. It's time to think about adapting to a warmer planet.

This notion is one of the great green taboos: Climate change is a specter to be fought, not accommodated.Still, our ability to cope with global warming is far greater than our chances of stopping it entirely. Technology lets us build carbon-neutral houses 7,000 feet up in the Colorado Rockies. Monsanto and friends are engineering crops to withstand drought. For the hapless birds and bees, wildlife scientists are plotting what they call assisted migrations.

Still nervous? Then consider an even bigger taboo: geo-engineering. Invasive surgery on a planetary scale is getting attention from serious scientists, including Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen and National Academy of Sciences president Ralph Cicerone. Proposals include everything from costly, low-risk efforts (lofting a giant mirror into orbit) to cheap desperation moves (adulterating the stratosphere with reflective dust).

In his 1992 best seller, Earth in the Balance, Al Gore derided adaptation as "a kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our own skin." Better to take Stewart Brand's advice from the opening page of the original Whole Earth Catalog: "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." We're in charge here. Let's get to work.